negligee

From Chaucer’s supercilious Madame Eglantine in “The Canterbury Tales,” with her spoiled lap dogs and secular French airs, to Ryan Murphy’s ruthless Sister Jude in 2012’s “American Horror Story: Asylum,” a woman who wears a red negligee under her habit and is not above indulging in some communion wine, fictional portrayals of nuns have long captured and confounded the imagination.

Mauri remembered, “He told me, ‘When you go over there, she’s going to be in a negligee, low-cut, and she’s going to drop a handkerchief.

Blurring those realms — which the original director, Harold Prince, had taken pains to keep separate — turned Sally, a Weimar party girl in Joe Masteroff’s book, into a neither-world negligee zombie.

In the 1950s and early ’60s, his monster movies were perfect for drive-in theaters, where audiences took in wildly improbable plots, silly dialogue and crude special effects: locusts overrunning a miniature city, a gigantic rat hovering over a girl in a negligee, Ms. Lupino being eaten by vast mealworms.

The negligee is coming out of the bedroom next season at Dolce & Gabbana, where sheer and lace lingerie looks set the tone during a season when nude dressing is one of the hottest trends on the Milan runway.